Page 51 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

36 Chapter 2

regime’s integralist rhetoric through content and through its distinctive discursive
form.
At several points, resonances between Simanjuntak’s treatise and the ideas in
Sidelines are clear, particularly in discussions of the New Order’s denigration of
individual rights. In a column boldly titled “Human Rights,” for example, Mohamad
quotes Sukarno’s announcement during the constitutional convention of 1945: “We
are drawing up the Constitution with the sovereignty of the people (rakyat), and not
the sovereignty of the individual (individu).” Mohamad then asks, “Why the people
and not the individual?” and presents Sukarno’s explanation: it is “the rights of liberty
of man-as-individual ‘that [have made] the countries of Europe and America full of
conflict, unrest, class struggle and war.’” But Mohamad rejects this logic, asserting
that “Sukarno was surely mistaken”—an implicit critique of President Suharto’s simi-
lar denunciations of individual rights.
9
In a different column, “Family,” Mohamad’s defense of individual rights is pref-
aced by a deconstruction of the family metaphor Suharto used to popularize integralist
doctrine. The discussion concludes, “the country is never a family, and a head of state
can never be like a real father to the citizens.” Similarly, in “Monsters,” Mohamad
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describes his epiphany “that not everyone agrees with Professor Supomo, who . . .
described the ‘state’ as like a wise father to its children, the ‘people.’ After all,” he
continues, “hasn’t the experience of the young Republic shown that the ‘father’ can
act wrongfully toward the children?”
11
Published in February 1992, “Han Sui,” a column about three children whose
father was tortured and killed, opens by asking: “Where do rights come from?” Echo-
ing Enlightenment theories of natural law, Mohamad speculates: “From God, one
opinion would say. . . . [Rights] have existed since our existence began and therefore
cannot be taken away.” His commentary becomes more poignant as he recounts the
children’s story. The voice of the oldest, Han Sui, haunts him, making him “always
ask,” when thinking of rights, “why it was that Han Sui seemed to have no right to
make an issue of the death of his father—and why I felt that I had no right to tell
it.” He reflects on debates over rights that have inspired statements like that by the
American Association of Anthropology: “What are held to be human rights in one
society may be regarded as anti-social by another people.” At a philosophical level, he
acknowledges, “‘West’ is indeed ‘West’ and ‘East’ is ‘East.’ How complicated.” Yet for
Han Sui’s father, and others suffering a similar fate, “the matter is not abstract: they
have been tortured.”
12
“Han Sui” ventures an implicit critique of the “Asian values” discourse popular-
ized in the 1990s by neighboring autocrats Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore and Mahatir
Mohamad of Malaysia to justify authoritarianism throughout Southeast Asia. Other
Sidelines columns focus more narrowly on “Indonesian values” and Suharto’s pro-
motion of a distinctive “Indonesian democracy” to legitimate suppressing rights.
Recalling Sukarno’s command “Indonesia, choose your own genuine democracy!” that
prefigured Suharto’s call for a “Pancasila democracy,” Mohamad predicts “the twen-
tieth century will probably end in disillusionment. . . . [T]his original democracy,” he
explains, “with its distinctive style—this better alternative that we have hoped for—is
extremely difficult to find.”
13
Other pieces can be read as defenses of Western democracy. In “Management of
Conflict,” for example, Mohamad again addresses fears that liberal democracy breeds
conflict—a phobia, he says, shared by all totalitarian regimes that view conflict as
“the rider on the horse of the apocalypse, bearing chaos.” Indonesians are “afraid